During a manufacture of a disk drive, components of the disk drive may be damaged. For example, a head of a head stack assembly in the disk drive may become damaged. Rather than disposing of the whole disk drive or even the whole head stack assembly, the damaged head can be removed.
Conventionally, the removal of the damaged head involved a user loading the head stack assembly onto a conventional de-swage machine. The user then manually determines which head of the head stack assembly to remove and manually aligns the blades with the head of the head stack assembly for removal. The user manually moves the blade down towards the head stack assembly to separate a portion of the head stack assembly containing the head to be removed from the head stack assembly.
However, the head stack assembly often contains more than one head. Furthermore, such heads may be rather small in size due to the diminishing size of the disk drive. In such a case, the user may accidentally choose the wrong head for removal. In addition, even if the user selects the correct head for removal, the wrong head may be removed anyways due to the misalignment of the blade and the head that should be removed. This may create additional expenses for the repair of the head stack assembly.
Even if the blade is generally aligned with the head that should be removed, the blade may not be precisely aligned to cleanly separate the portion of the head stack assembly containing the head to be removed from the head stack assembly. In such a case, the portion of the head stack assembly containing the head to be removed or even the blade itself may be undesirably damaged.